# BoDiffusion: Diffusing Sparse Observations for Full-Body Human Motion Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11118 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11118/

## Key facts

- Cited by 45 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [Improving Variational Inference with Inverse Autoregressive Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04934/) (2016)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14109/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Scene: Scene-Based Text-to-Image Generation with Human Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13131/) (2022)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00349/) (2022)
- [DiffusionBERT: Improving Generative Masked Language Models with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15029/) (2022)
- [Character Controllers Using Motion VAEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14274/) (2021)
- [Physical Inertial Poser (PIP): Physics-aware Real-time Human Motion Tracking from Sparse Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08528/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18259/) (2023)
- [Nymeria: A Massive Collection of Multimodal Egocentric Daily Motion in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09905/) (2024)
- [Seamless Human Motion Composition with Blended Positional Encodings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15509/) (2024)
- [Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01284/) (2024)
- [Estimating Body and Hand Motion in an Ego-sensed World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03665/) (2024)
- [ReGenNet: Towards Human Action-Reaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11882/) (2024)
- [RoHM: Robust Human Motion Reconstruction via Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08570/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Guidance: Training-free Acceleration of Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12487/) (2023)
- [Whole-Body Conditioned Egocentric Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21552/) (2025)
- [EgoLM: Multi-Modal Language Model of Egocentric Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18127/) (2024)
- [HMD^2: Environment-aware Motion Generation from Single Egocentric Head-Mounted Device](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13426/) (2024)
- [Stratified Avatar Generation from Sparse Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20786/) (2024)
- [Ego4o: Egocentric Human Motion Capture and Understanding from Multi-Modal Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08449/) (2025)
- [UniEgoMotion: A Unified Model for Egocentric Motion Reconstruction, Forecasting, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01126/) (2025)
- [The Invisible EgoHand: 3D Hand Forecasting through EgoBody Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08654/) (2025)
- [HERO: Human Reaction Generation from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08270/) (2025)
- [Reconstructing 4D Spatial Intelligence: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21045/) (2025)
- [EMHI: A Multimodal Egocentric Human Motion Dataset with HMD and Body-Worn IMUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17168/) (2024)
- [EgoCast: Forecasting Egocentric Human Pose in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02903/) (2024)
- [From Sparse Signal to Smooth Motion: Real-Time Motion Generation with Rolling Prediction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05265/) (2025)
- [Estimating Ego-Body Pose from Doubly Sparse Egocentric Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03561/) (2024)
- [ECHO: Ego-Centric modeling of Human-Object interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21556/) (2025)
- [Towards Motion Turing Test: Evaluating Human-Likeness in Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06181/) (2026)
- [Self-Avatar Animation in Virtual Reality: Impact of Motion Signals Artifacts on the Full-Body Pose Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18628/) (2024)
- [DragPoser: Motion Reconstruction from Variable Sparse Tracking Signals via Latent Space Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14567/) (2024)
- [Ground Reaction Inertial Poser: Physics-based Human Motion Capture from Sparse IMUs and Insole Pressure Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16233/) (2026)
- [Seeing Without Eyes: 4D Human-Scene Understanding from Wearable IMUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21926/) (2026)
- [SSD-Poser: Avatar Pose Estimation with State Space Duality from Sparse Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18332/) (2025)
- [MotionGRPO: Overcoming Low Intra-Group Diversity in GRPO-Based Egocentric Motion Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05680/) (2026)
- [Towards Real-World Wearable Motion Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09780/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mixed reality applications require tracking the user's full-body motion to enable an immersive experience. However, typical head-mounted devices can only track head and hand movements, leading to a limited reconstruction of full-body motion due to variability in lower body configurations. We propose BoDiffusion -- a generative diffusion model for motion synthesis to tackle this under-constrained reconstruction problem. We present a time and space conditioning scheme that allows BoDiffusion to leverage sparse tracking inputs while generating smooth and realistic full-body motion sequences. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that uses the reverse diffusion process to model full-body tracking as a conditional sequence generation task. We conduct experiments on the large-scale motion-capture dataset AMASS and show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin in terms of full-body motion realism and joint reconstruction error.